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Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

I find these quite interesting and I would be very surprised if these were not the actual common way of writing in cursive learned in school?

When I was growing up in Bulgaria my first 7 (I would write the 7 crossed by default for example, the Z as well) grades were in a school where we learned German (and Russian as a secondary foreign language) and I remember distinctly handwriting practice in German using more or less the same ways outlined in this article. Is this way of writing cursive not common in the US/UK?

Reading Greek is easy for _most_ Bulgarians (inventors of Cyrillic if you didn't know that) as you can imagine. Them being a geographical neighbor and the close historical ties etc.

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> I find these quite interesting and I would be very surprised if these were not the actual common way of writing in cursive learned in school?

With the version I learned in the US in the late 90s, mostly not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian#/media/File:D'Neal...

The "z" in particular with the crossbar wasn't a thing for any version of writing I learned, and they're missing the leading/trailing tails for most of their versions of the lowercase letters. Even in printing - I learned to write an "l" as a vertical line with a tail to the right, so it's different from 1 or I without a cursive loop.

Funny enough in "digits" section: "Put a loop on the 2 so it doesn’t look like a z" - The looped version is identical to a cursive uppercase "Q".

ISTR the origin of Cyril and Methodius (the two monks that created the precursor to the cyrillic alphabet, can't remember the exact name of that alphabet ATM) cannot be pinpointed as either Greek or Bulgarian because no such documentation has been found. They surely were Byzantine, though.

Cyril and Methodius didn't create Cyrillic. That's a very common misconception. They created the Glagolitic[1] alphabet which was a precursor script. Cyrillic was developed later by their students and other scholars in the Preslav Literary School[2]. They named it Cyrillic to honour the brothers, but the brothers themselves didn't create Cyrillic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav_Literary_School

EDIT: Sorry, I misread what you wrote. It's late and it's been a long day. You weren't saying the brothers created Cyrillic. As for whether they were Greek/Bulgarian I cannot say. I've read different opinions on that throughout the years. Definitely Byzantine, but anything else I cannot say.

playing oboe is easy for _most_ Frenchs (inventors of the oboe if you didn't know that)

Your snark comment is out of place since if you knew something about Cyrillic you'll know that most letters have 1:1 mapping with their Greek counterparts. And since Bulgarian language does use Cyrillic the jump to Greek is quite short. You could argue that there's a bigger difference in pronunciation of letters between English, German and French which all use the Latin alphabet than between Cyrillic and Greek.

all i'm arguing is whatever "nation (2 guys) invented" something doesn't imply that every national know it better than everyone else

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